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A Day at the Races

25/1/2014

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You arrive nice and early and find somewhere to sit, maybe have a drink or some distinctly dodgy food, and look through the day’s racing. You circle some contenders for a fun placepot, and pick out your nap of the day in the third, the one you’re going to put a nice wedge on. You’ve given yourself £100 to play with, not including entrance fee but hopefully including sundry drinks and scoff. In your mind you’ve divided it into £10 on each of five races, and £40 or £50 on the big race. Your nap looks to have a lot going for it – Henderson and Geraghty, and in this field you may be able to get 4/1. You tell your mates you like the look of that. You like to think of yourself as a shrewd gambler, compared to them anyway.

You look at the first race and can’t see anything you fancy. Two of the big yards have unraced horses with chances – Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson. You wouldn’t dream of betting in this race at home, but as you’re here you may as well have a bit of fun. You decide to see what’s happening with the prices – they are both a tentative 3/1 on the Racing Post tissue. Opening show has the Henderson horse at 5/2 and Nicholls' at 4/1. You lean towards Nicholls. After all, you’ve just seen him tucking into an ice cream in the pre parade ring. Besides the punters don’t give Henderson's a chance and it drifts out to 7/2 at the off. You’re happy you got the ‘value’ (a tenner at 4/1) on the well-backed Nicholls horse, which goes off at 11/4.

The Henderson horse wins. The Nicholls horse drops out of contention three from home. Your placepot choice falls at the last when hanging onto third. You have a drink. Henderson's got the favourite in the next. It’s won it’s last two races, looks to be improving and nothing else looks likely. 2/1 will have to do. You’ll at least get your money back.

You go outside and it seems everyone wants the Henderson horse. The bookies are being cautious – you see 7/4 a few boards back and try to get there, but a bloke in front of you gets £700 to £400, and the bookie rubs the price off. Most boards are now going 6/4. Suddenly you see 13/8, you run and grab an extra note from your pocket to make the most of it. It’s a score. You find yourself giving the bookie both notes. Your tenner fun bet is now a £30 win bet. Still, phew, you’re on.

It seems like the whole crowd is on your horse. Two out, it hits the front and the crowd starts cheering. Fantastic. From the corner of your eye you see another horse travelling ominously well a couple of lengths behind. They jump the final flight alongsides and the jockeys settle down to fight it out. Your horse must win under the Geraghty drive, but as they stretch away to the line you can see that he other horse is going to win – the cheers die in the crowd’s throat. Your mate’s girlfriend next to you starts cheering. Her horse – let's call it Pretty Iris - has won at 20/1. “I liked the name” she says. You smile, but you’re cross with yourself. And then you look down and see that it was trained by Nicholls, his second string ridden by the stable apprentice. Just brilliant.

The girlfriend gets her £40 winnings from the Tote and buys you all a drink. She’s delighted. It’s the first time she’s been racing and it all seems so simple. You smile. You’re a bit late leaving the bar, and the prices are up for the next. So much for that 4/1. More like 3/1. You groan. You wait to see if it will go to 7/2. You re-look at the form. There’s another nice-priced Nicholls horse, this time at 8/1. You look up and see 10/1 at the board next to you. You immediately ask for twenty quid at 10/1. Once you’ve got your ticket you realise the ‘value’ on the Henderson horse has gone – it’s now 11/4 at best. You go inside and do a fiver combination exacta on the two runners. No a tenner. After all, you meant to have a good bet on this race.

You go back to the standing area where you and your friends meet between each race. They ask you what price you got. You smile enigmatically and don’t say anything. The girl says she’s had a fiver on Barney Geraghty. Oh how your friends laugh. And so does she, when Barry goes six lengths clear at the last to win to tumultuous cheers. The Nicholls horse fell four out when struggling.

You excuse yourself and go the toilet. You go to a cubicle, wondering whether you really are going to pretend to your mates that you had backed the Henderson horse. You count how much money you have left from your hundred. What with a race programme, lunch and a placepot, plus £80 in bets, you have £2.15 left. And it’s your round.

Familiar? 


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Be Careful Who You Sit Down With

23/1/2014

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Better Bet

Here's a gambling tip for free:
If Betfair is the biggest price,
And it seems too good to be true,
Before you wade in, you'd better think twice
Because someone knows more than you.  













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Saturday gambling - advice from a bookmaker

18/1/2014

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Anyone thinking of getting stuck into some short-priced football accas after last weekend's results should read this wealth-warning from the boss of William Hill

Ralph Topping reavealed that last weekend's football results – in which eight odds-on favourites in the Premier League won, along with 11 of the 12 shortest-priced favoruites in the Football League – cost Hills £13m. However, Topping told analysts:


“These are the kind of results, just like Dettori day, that change customer behaviour. In 1996 we saw a big increase in accumulator betting on racing after Frankie won all seven races at Ascot. This time it's about a lot of small numbers – 50,000 customers online won at least £50 and retail saw the same thing. That's great if you are in my shoes because it's the sort of win that gives customers confidence, and that confidence lasts a long time.”

Be careful out there...
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It was a simple time and I had a simple edge...

7/1/2014

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There was a time before the internet and Oddschecker and Betfair. A time even before telephone betting was commonplace. Back in the mists of time. Ooh, what, 15 years ago.  It was a simple time and I had a simple edge.

Back then the bookies didn't price up every race in the morning, but they had started pricing up a handful most days. I would go onto teletext and look at each of the sites of the main bookies and write down all the prices and then compare them. It would take me an hour to do this – to produce my own version of Oddschecker, or whatever you might use these days.

Had I lived in Shropshire as I do now, this would have been of no use to me. For we only have a Corals in our town (and even then they worked to the largest over-round). But back then I lived in Tooting, and I had a circular walk that allowed me to take in a load of shops – multiple Ladbrokes and Hills, plus The Tote, Paddy Power and several others long since gone.

So, I knew the prices available in the market place and was able to shop around for them. And that constituted a significant edge. And because my approach was unusual the bookmakers stood their prices for a lot longer than now. Their stand-out prices (and mistakes) weren't wiped out in a second by value hunters and arbers sat at their laptops in their underpants, armed only with Oddschecker and Betfair.

Sometimes technology makes things too easy for everyone. It levels the playing field.









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How do you know if you are winning?

2/1/2014

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The New Year – that's not a bad time to take stock of your gambling, is it?  In the past I've always chosen a somewhat arbitrary “end” to both the flat season (Cesarewitch) and the jumps season (Grand National). But I want to spend 2014 on this blog thinking about gambling rather than posting up bad bets, so let's start with a clean slate.

Let's start with this question. How do you know if you're winning or losing?  After all, ask most gamblers how they're doing and they'll shrug their shoulders and say “I'm about even”.  As we know everyone takes this to mean “losing”.

Obviously, if you're at all professional you will have a detailed spreadsheet itemising all your bets entered under all sorts of categories (sport, racecourse, type of bet etc, etc).  Back in the day mine was a thing of utmost beauty.  A friend e-mailed me last week to say with typical precision – “I ended the season £130.35 down.” which as you can maybe guess for someone so meticulous is a rare red figure he'll be working extra hard to rectify.

I haven't kept a spreadsheet since my serious gambling days.  I don't bet enough, or well enough, any more for it to be worthwhile.  Instead, I looked at my Betfair profit and loss for 2013, and it wasn't pretty.  Both football and racing showed miserable losses, though - to put that into perspective - the accumulated losses for the year are the equivalent of one bad Saturday back in the proper gambling years.

As for your conventional internet bookmaker accounts, measuring them is easy.  You don't have to delve back into history.  There's three levels of success:

1.  You win consistently (or sometimes just once) and they will either refuse your business or limit your stakes to such an extent they might as well have closed your account. This is mighty annoying and I'll come back to it again, but for the moment the best approach is to treat it as a badge of honour.

2.  You are allowed to bet as much as you want with whomever you want. You are in that “breaking even” netherworld we mentioned above.

3. The bookmakers inundate you with loyalty vouchers, special offers, inducements and trinkets. In simpler times they used to send “valued customers” a diary for the coming sporting year. A friend often boasted of receiving 17 diaries a year and, in so doing, unwittingly confirmed his own gambling incompetence.

As am I when I say Bet365 have been offering me £5 “bonuses” all year – roughly fortnightly. That's how well my betting has gone in 2013.  And, as if that wasn't bad enough, it looks like they too have been reviewing the year's profit and loss on my account. For this morning I was upgraded to a £10 bonus...  

















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    Gambling

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